1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a display device that displays images, an image information management device that manages image information, an image information management terminal that operates the managed image information, an image information management system including the image information management device and the image information management terminal, an image searching method for searching images, a database construction method for constructing an image database, and a photographing device that photographs images. In particular, the present invention relates to a display device with which photographing states of images can easily be known, an image information management device, an image information management terminal, an image information management system, an image searching method, a database construction method, and a photographing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many images have come to be accumulated in accompaniment with the spread of digital photographing devices and an increase in the capacity of storage devices. In order to effectively use the accumulated images, it is preferable to be able to easily know the photographing states of the images without directly viewing each image.
For this reason, in conventional image management, a character string such as, for example, a keyword, a photographing place, or a comment, is added to the images as information representing the photographing states of the images and managed. Thus, an image can be effectively used by searching a desired image by designating the character string as a search condition (e.g., see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication (JP-A) No. 11-66089).
However, in this case, the information representing the photographing state is characters, and it is difficult for a user to imagine the photographing state of the image from the characters. For this reason, in conventional image searching, the photographing state of the image is verified by viewing plural representative images and an image serving as a key is selected, whereby an optimum keyword is automatically generated in order to search for an image (e.g., see JP-A No. 7-36916).
However, in this case, the photographing state of the desired image must be imagined from the photographing state of another image, and it is not always the case that the image of the desired photographing state can be obtained from the obtained keyword.